Antique Books

Antique Enameled Jewelry (Schiffer Book for Collectors)

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Antique Firearms Assembly Disassembly: The comprehensive guide to pistols, rifles and...

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Antique Flea Markets of London and Paris

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Antique French Textiles For Designers (Schiffer Book)

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Antique Furniture and Decorative Accessories (Dover Pictorial Archive Series)

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Antique Furniture of Quebec: Four Centuries of Furniture-Making

Antique Furniture of Québec brings together hundreds of sumptuous full-colour photographs illustrating every phase in the history of Québec furniture and an authoritative text written by Michel Lessard describing and analysing that history. The result is a book that is both a beautiful object and an unparalleled resource.

Lessard emphasizes the cosmopolitan and eclectic nature of Québec society and its openness to outside influences. He draws upon both textual and photographic sources to demonstrate that Quebeckers, from the first years of settlement to the present time, have adopted craft and design ideas from abroad. The three cultures that have historically shaped Québec society, that of France, Great Britain, and the United States, have naturally been the most powerful influences. Lessard traces their effect while, at the same time, demonstrating the often original and creative response to these influences by Québec designers, artists, and craftspeople.

It’s all in these pages: from the ornate and often heavy furniture of eighteenth century France to the primitive, Shaker-influenced pine furniture of rural Québec, to William Morris and Art Deco and, finally, the Modern era.

Of particular interest is the series of homes that the author has tracked down, each typical of a particular era and each preserved with furnishings appropriate to the era in place. Show More By this and other means, Michel Lessard masterfully combines an appreciation of the historical and social context in which furniture is made and used with a thorough understanding of the craft and business of furniture-making.

“Furniture,” writes Michel Lessard, “is an open book containing a multitude of stories.” This lavish and authoritative book is certain to continue telling its stories for years to come.

Antique Garden Tools And Accessories (Schiffer Book for Collectors)

In thousands of years of tilling the soil, we have created a great variety of garden tools to dig, cut scrub, harrow fields, and trim borders. What makes the tools unique, and collectible, is the way function has dictated form, resulting in not only ingenious shapes, but artistic ones. In the 19th and early 20th centuries garden tool catalogs listed hundreds of task-specific tools including dibbers, mattocks, potato hoes, onion hoes, Daisy grubbers, claws, weeders, forcers, straighteners, garden row markers, garden reels, rakes, watering cans, water tanks, lawn mowers, lawn rollers, weed whackers, and many many more. This book looks back at two hundred years of garden history, and attempts to identify the tools and accessories that gardeners used, and as much as possible identify their specific functions. With over 750 color photographs, concise captions, and a guide to prices in today's antique marketplace, this is a useful as well as beautiful exploration of garden implements.